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1 Jerry Shang 5/9/2018 History 310 Austro-Marxism: Finding 1 Jerry Shang 5/9/2018 History 310 Austro-Marxism: Finding Socialism in Modernity Introduction In Otto Bauer’s What is Austro-Marxism? (1927), he stated that Austro-Marxism was first coined by an American socialist, L. Boudin, to describe a collection of Marxist thinkers including Max Adler, Karl Renner, Rudolf Hilferding, Otto Bauer and others who grew up in the socialist student movement of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Despite these thinkers’ common background, Austro- Marxism as a school of thought lacked the unity L. Boudin conferred to it through its name. Even Otto Bauer himself noted that this group of scholars “were united not so much by a specific political orientation.”1 These thinkers cited above all had interests in different areas, for example, Max Adler took on a theoretical approach and tried to apply a neo-Kantian emphasis on subjectivity and human volitions to the Marxist concept of historical progression; Karl Renner focused more on the law and its ability to support the capitalist system; Rudolf Hilferding was known for his discussion on finance capital and his extension upon Marxist economic theories; Otto Bauer focused on the question of nationality and its incorporation into Marxist thoughts. Though this was not to say that there were no communications and references between these thinkers, the various focuses and interests made it hard to characterize Austro-Marxism as a unified movement. In a sense, Otto Bauer’s question posed by his title remained unanswered. Current historiography on Austro-Marxism has also shied away from this question by focusing on individual thinkers. Bulloch’s Karl Renner: Austria, Smaldone’s Rudolf Hilferding: the tragedy of a German Social Democrat, and Czerwińska-Schupp’s Otto Bauer 1881-1938: 1 Otto Bauer. ‘Was ist Austro-Marxismus?’ Arbeiter-Zeitung, 3 November 1927, in T. B. Bottomore, and Patrick Goode. Austro-marxism. (Oxford [Eng.]: Clarendon Press. 1978.) 45. 2 Thinker and Politician all represent this trend. While their books show the complexity and the development of each thinkers’ theories, they do not situate them within a larger intellectual movement. Meanwhile, another trend in the historiography on Austro-Marxism is to focus on the inter-war period and Red Vienna. Helmut Gruber’s Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture 1919~1934 is one representation. While he provides a comprehensive summary of Austro- Marxist thoughts, this is used mainly as a springboard to discuss how these thoughts affect the policies of Red Vienna. While Red Vienna is definitely a fruitful place for research concerning the practices of Austro-Marxist politicians, it should not be ignored that it was essentially under the social, economic, cultural atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna where Austro-Marxism reached its theoretical maturation. This paper tries to resituate current historiography on Austro-Marxism within the context of fin-de-siècle Austro-Hungarian Empire and argues that these thinkers were united by their shared experiences of using a Marxist vocabulary to understand and respond to their increasingly unfamiliar modern world. Two intersecting changes that preoccupied the thoughts of Austro- Marxists were the fall of liberalism and the rise of nationalism. In Carl E. Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, he characterizes this modern world as moving away from liberalism and rationality while embracing the psyche, the fragmented, and the disintegrated. He argues that: “Vienna in the fin de siecle, with its acutely felt tremors of social and political disintegrations, proved one of the most fertile breeding grounds of our century’s a-historical culture. Its great intellectual innovators… all broke… their ties to the historical outlook central to the nineteenth-century liberal culture in which they had been reared.”2 While Schorske demonstrates how fin-de-siècle intellectuals and artists saw modernity as disruptive and “a-historical”, this view of modernity is incompatible with a Marxist tradition that 2 Carl E Schorske. Fin-de-siècle vienna: Politics and culture. (New York: Knopf: distributed by Random House. 1980.) xviii. 3 situates social and economic developments in a larger history of the dialectic transition from feudalism to capitalism and eventually to socialism. This paper argues that by subscribing to the Marxist theories of the stages of development, Austro-Marxists strived to present a socialist answer to the disrupted and fragmented modern life and provide a sense of political direction and conviction regarding the new social and economic developments. By viewing socialism as the eventual end goal, Austro-Marxists deliberately eschewed a pessimistic understanding of modernity and instead saw it as presenting new opportunities through which socialism could one day be reached. Austro-Marxists adopted a similarly optimistic attitude in regard to the rise of nationalism. Realizing the disrupted forces of nationalism and its fragmented effects on the Austro-Hungarian state and society, Austro-Marxists responded by offering a Marxist interpretation of nationalism that focused on its ability to incorporate the masses into politics and cultural productions that used to exclude them. Rather than seeing nationalism as a disrupted and backward force that reverted the progress of liberalism as many scholars did, Austro-Marxists saw nationalism as part of the progress that would transform the exclusive liberal society to a humanitarian socialist society. Through this light, national organizations were understood as the building blocks that could organize and facilitate the transition from capitalism to socialism. However, as Austro-Marxist thinkers demonstrated, the existence of these new opportunities was not enough in itself to transform the society. Central to these thinkers’ conception of the transition from capitalism to socialism was the role of the modern state. The changing economic, social, and cultural realities allowed these thinkers to view the state as a potentially rational and effective tool that could facilitate the process of socialization while also ensuring these changes happened in a peaceful and non-disruptive way. From this emphasis on the 4 state, this paper draws two conclusions. First, this focus suggested an intellectual shift where traditional Marxist emphasis on the economic base was substituted by a growing emphasis on the superstructure; it was in the superstructure where conscious actions and concrete possibilities towards socialism were made available. Second, it demonstrated Austro-Marxists’ desire for stability and direction, for an apparatus that could guide and anchor modern changes in the path towards socialism. New Economic Reality and the Insufficiency of Marxist Thoughts One component of modernity that Schorske stresses in his analysis is the collapse of liberalism. This section examines this collapse from an economic perspective. It looks at the transformative economic circumstances of late 19th century Austro-Hungarian Empire and argues that it was to these economic changes that Austro-Marxist thinkers responded and based their theories on. It further demonstrates the increasing insufficiencies of Marx’s theories to explain these modern economic phenomena, which opened up new possibilities for Austro-Marxist thinkers to expand and even diverge from Marxist analysis for creative solutions. Austro-Hungarian Empire’s engagement with economic liberalism was brief. After Austro- Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the Cisleithanian half of the government adopted December Constitution and initiated a series of liberalization reforms and entered into a period of economic growth that was commonly known as Gründerzeit (1867~1873). However, such a prospect for further economic prosperity ended with the crash of the Vienna Stock Exchange on 9 May 1873. The crash and the ensuing economic disorders were vital blows to laissez-faire policies and ended the ideological optimism people placed on liberalism. Rather than promised progress, the supposedly rational market and reasonable individual decision-maker brought economic ruins and disruptions. From this demoralization of economic liberalism emerged a new socio-economic 5 model that focused on state interventions, cartelization, and centralization. During this process, the banking sector with its financial power and its ability to invest long-term in industries became an increasingly important organization that could interfere in capitalist expansions and to avoid economic crises.3 After the crash of 1873, Austrian economic policies both from a state level and from the level of individual firms and banks increasingly emphasized centralization, cooperation, and intervention. Marx in Capital predicted this trend of centralization of the capital in the hands of the few by stating, “It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals.” 4 However, the new economic developments to a degree deviated from Marx’s interpretation of centralization. In Marx’s understanding, centralization was the inevitable result of free competition which pushed out smaller businesses, “competition rages.... It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish.”5 However, in the late 19th-century Austrian economy, centralization occurred as measures taken to avoid this competition. Small businesses did
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